Hi folks. I have been following this thread since 8a CST after my wife reported Vonage down. My Vonage service is in Milwaukee, WI.

It's 2p CST and it's still down; when I call home from work, I get 2.5 rings, then "beep, Beep, BEEP - The area code or number as dialed is not valid. Check the area code and number and dial again. The following tones are for the hearing impaired...

Dialing from my cell phone, I get the same thing but the call is cut after the three beeps. The phone displays "Call Failed: Not Available".

I called Vonage customer care again 866-243-4357 (this AM's service was much to be desired; no one had a clue about an outage), and after navigating through the menus, was told the wait time was over 15 minutes. I had some time to waste and was able to do other stuff while on hold.

Eventually, a rep answered. After providing my account info, she was able to inform me they are having a problem and are presently "doing an emergency upgrade". She had no idea when it was expected to be fixed but mentioned "in a couple of hours".

She asked if she could help me with anything else, otherwise, they were swamped and needed to answer other calls. I commented to her that they should put a message on the menus to announce a service problem (my cable company does that when there is an outage). She mentioned that she wished her supervisor could hear that. I thanked her and hung up.

One thing to note was our call was a little choppy. Not sure if Vonage was having a circuit capacity issue which would explain a lot (but rather stupid if they run their customer Voip, their Voip, and their web site through the same pipe, hope not).

+++

Suggestions to improve service:

1. Web page with service status available without having to login.

2. Status message on customer service number. After most people hear this, they hang up and wait it out a bit more.

2:50pm CST and voice mail now answers again!Vonage website now active again and message on dashboard states the following:

Quote:

At this time some customers are experiencing intermittent issues making and receiving calls. This also may affect calling features such as Call forwarding, Voicemail, etc. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working towards resolving it as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience in this matter and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We've been taking a closer look at AT&T now that they've brought their pricing in line with Vonage. Between home and business, we have a total of 6 Vonage lines. The tentative plan is to split those lines 50/50 between Vonage and AT&T. Only one business line is published (biz cards, yellow pages, etc) and the others are just rollover lines, so it won't be any problem for us to move 3 lines to another carrier.

They do have redudancy but unfortuntely i have an idea that this ICE storm has something to do with it. I am not at work now, I am home. Do not take your frustations out on me either please as I am in a non-professional matter especially on these forums, I will be happy to help,l but please keep the attacking away from me, and focus it on something else.

They do have redudancy but unfortuntely i have an idea that this ICE storm has something to do with it. I am not at work now, I am home. ....

Is this an "idea" or are you unequivocally stating "Today's Vonage connectivity problems are due to harsh weather conditions in the northeast U.S.?"

Any of us here could come up with "an idea" as to the cause. If you work for Vonage, and you can tell us the cause with some certainty, that would be appreciated. It would be the most information we'd received all day.

If they do not have geographical redundancy then we should not be using Vonage. For example, if you have a tech company of any size in CA you have to have redundancy some place where there are no earthquakes. You also need to have redundancy on different major power grids etc. so if major power goes down on the eastern seaboard you switch all capacity to someplace in the midwest. The idea that an ICE strorm is causing this problem would indicate that Vonage is learning as they go along and needs a better crisis prevention and management staff. I am amazed at the complete lack of customer service. Glad I did not need to place a 911 call today.

9:03pm. Still couldn't receive calls so I called Vonage and spoke to Habib over in India. All I needed to do was unplug my modem and plug it back in - annoying and between that and the phone call, about 20 minutes of my time wasted. THIS would have been useful information for the web site. "IF you are still experiencing problems, please try..."

I swear Vonage is run by a bunch of monkeys. I can't wait to get new service.